Keeping Election Campaign Promises When the Unexpected Happens

• In Event: Theoretical and Empirical Advances in the Study of Promissory Representation

Abstract

Promissory representation maintains that political parties should make promises to voters during election campaigns and keep those promises when governing after elections. But what happens when things change dramatically and unexpectedly between the times of promising and governing? We develop and test a theory of how unexpected change affects promise keeping. The theory identifies a range of the most relevant types of unexpected events and their impact on pledge fulfillment. These include economy-wide and sector-specific economic performance that deviates significantly from expectations either positively or negatively, as well as natural disasters that may have widespread or narrow effects. The impact of change depends on the kind of change that occurs and the nature of what is promised. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, some unexpected events are conducive to promise keeping. For instance, some governing parties respond to economy-wide economic disruptions by expanding programs, which are frequently the subject of election pledges. We test the implications of the theory using a mixed methods approach. A quantitative analysis assesses the impact of unexpected economic performance on pledge fulfillment in thirteen countries using a dataset on over 8,000 pledges. We also present new evidence on pledge fulfillment by Australian parties, which offers a particularly apt test of the impact of unexpected events. The Australian federal election of May 2019 was followed by the unexpected events of the 2019-20 bushfires and the COVID pandemic. It is commonly thought that unexpected events such as these make campaign promises irrelevant and unfulfillable. However, the findings demonstrate that unexpected events are often accompanied by promise keeping and that the impact of unexpected events on the likelihood of pledge fulfillment depends on the contents of the pledges and contexts in which they are made.

Authors

• Frank Rindert Algra-Maschio, Monash University

• Sonam Thomas, RMIT ABC Fact Check

• Robert Thomson, Monash University